[OSM-talk] Why OpenStreetMap is not Wikipedia

[Fabrizio Giudici]

On Jul 29, 2008, at 0:21 , Frederik Ramm wrote:

>
> I believe that some people are very quick to simply transfer "lessons
> learned" from Wikipedia onto OSM, sometimes without properly taking  
> into
> account that while there are similarities, there are also lots of
> differences.


There's another difference, which is quite important (to me at least).  
Wikipedia collects knowledge in general and a great deal of this  
knowledge (if not most of it) is partly subjective; in the end, the  
good faith of its contributors and the existence of a mechanism to  
verify it is important. Furthermore, there is stuff where the  
"objective truth" doesn't exist at all - all of this bring up the  
point of how much one trust in Wikipedia, if you prefer such an  
approach or the traditional one with an editor, a board of  
controllers, etc... On the contrary, OSM is documenting mostly factual  
data based on empirical observation (the GPS tracks). Yes, there are  
the boundary controversies etc, but fortunately they involve only a  
part of the world. Summing up, there are no strong problems of trust  
in OSM, while there are in Wikipedia, IMHO.

-- 
Fabrizio Giudici, Ph.D. - Java Architect, Project Manager
Tidalwave s.a.s. - "We make Java work. Everywhere."
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Fabrizio.Giudici at tidalwave.it - mobile: +39 348.150.6941